The Martian proves reason is our greatest renewable resource

Matt Damon in a scene from The Martian. Fox films

If the Prime Minister needs a champion for his campaign for innovation, Matt Damon’s character in the film The Martian surely fits the bill.

Stranded on Mars with no apparent means of making contact with earth, astronaut Mark Watney refuses to despair.

“I’m going to have to science the shit out of this,” he declares.

Ridley Scott’s inspiring epic is, in the words of one critic, a love poem for science. It offers overdue relief from the fatalism that has darkened the screens of late. In a battle between the human race and the forces of nature, our collective ingenuity, industry and mettle will succeed in the end.

The Martian reminds us of the heroic sci-fi films from the 1950s when our confidence in science and technology was unqualified. The alien forces from outer space can do their worst; humankind, with its back against the wall, will draw on reason and invention to triumph in the end.

From the early 1970s pessimism began to set in to the film industry, reflecting a deeper distrust of technology. Science became the problem, rather than the solution. When disaster struck, it was mankind’s hubris, more often than not, that had created the predicament in the first place.

The British television film Doomwatch, screened in February 1970, marked a turning point. A government agency — the Department of Observation and Measurement of Science — had been established to guard against the abuses of progress.

For Hollywood, achievements that once inspired were now seen as fallible. Humankind had been too clever by half and the planet was hitting back. The Towering Inferno and Airport 1975 portrayed the helplessness of humans in the face of disaster.

The catalogue of catastrophism is extensive. Avalanche, The Poseidon Adventure, The Andromeda Strain and The China Syndrome, to name but a few, reflected a broader loss of faith in the power of reason.

When skyscrapers come crashing down in the 1974 film Earthquake, a construction engineer played by Charlton Heston blubbers: “I’m ashamed of my profession.” Watney, by contrast, is no techno-wuss. Left behind by accident on an unforgiving planet with dwindling rations, he reasons that since ingenuity got him up there, ingenuity will get him back.

He is not the first to face the challenge of growing food on alien soil.

When the Pilgrim fathers landed in Massachusetts in 1620 they almost starved to death before the Native Americans showed the settlers how to add fishmeal to the soil.

When NSW was settled in 1788 the colony had the benefit of advancements of recent agricultural science. Pioneer convict settler James Ruse showed the way by adding potash in the form of burnt timber and decomposing grass and weeds.

Watney relies on the enzymes and nutrients in astronaut poo, which he mixes in with Martian dirt to cultivate potatoes. “I don’t want to sound arrogant or anything,” Watney muses, “but I’m the best botanist on the planet.”

By today’s prissy standards of eco-correctness, The Martian is wrong in so many ways. Watney sets out to conquer nature, not be conquered by it. Virtue is shown in taking risks rather than avoiding them. Sustainability is not a matter of preserving scarce resources but by going out to look for more.

The deeply subversive message for our eco-anxious times is that taming a planet is a good thing to do. The lingering wide shot of Watney’s Mars rover heading across the red dirt towards the horizon conjures images of 19th-century wagons opening the frontiers of civilisation.

Watney embodies the spirit of progress idea that Alexis de Tocqueville concludes was the making of America. It is the belief “that man is endowed with an indefinite faculty for improvement … forever seeking, forever falling to rise again, often disappointed, but not discouraged”.

There is less fiction in this film than we may like to imagine. Almost all the technology Watney relies on exists today.

The saws, hammers and gaffer tape he uses to adapt his escape capsule are hardly complicated tools. When he removes the heavy nose cone to reduce the weight and replaces it with plastic sheeting an incredulous NASA scientist exclaims. “You want to put him into space under a tarp?”

The attitude to risk in the film is deeply at odds with our present-day caution. Setbacks are an inspiration to do better, not to give up. Danger goes with the job. “This is space; it does not co-operate,” says Watney. His self-possession in the face of inestimable survival odds reflects the spirit that drove the moon mission.

We saw it 20 years ago in Ron Howard’s film Apollo 13, based on a real-life moon mission that almost ended in disaster. Like Watney, Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert survive on ingenuity and grit.

Which brings us to the trillion-dollar question; why aren’t we aiming for Mars? Where is the audaciousness of president John Kennedy who, in an address to congress in May 1961, pledged to land men on the moon and bring them home within a decade?

Kennedy was driven by the imperatives of the Cold War and the fear that the Soviet Union was gaining the upper hand in science. Today Russia is in the ascendant again, outsmarting the US in the Middle East.

Will Barack Obama respond as Kennedy did by shooting for the stars? Will he put his faith in American exceptionalism, confident that a society that grants freedom to the human spirit will prosper more than one that tries to contain it?

The Martian shows the US as it ought to be: confident, clever and courageous.

It reminds us, too, of the inestimable value of our greatest renewable resource: the power of human reason.

Nick Cater is executive director of the Menzies Research Centre.